


Bedding the Wolf

by leonidaslion



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: First Time, Light Bondage, M/M, Restraints, Rough Sex, Secret Yearning, Self Esteem Issues, consort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-14
Updated: 2011-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-24 14:29:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/264542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Sif thinks she's going to get away with wedding Loki's idiot brother, then she's sorely mistaken...</p><p>OR</p><p>Thor is smarter than Loki thinks he is...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bedding the Wolf

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamlittleyo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamlittleyo/gifts).



It’s the wolf that brings Loki word of the happy couple. It slinks into the cave with its belly to the ground, metal fur leaving deep gouges and sparking against the rock. The floor of Loki’s den looks like the inside of a forge after so many months ( _years?_ ) spent recovering—an endless procession of night and day and night that Loki has endured silent and alone, with only this single and most loyal of his creations for company.

How Fenrir found him, he doesn’t know. He thought the wolf destroyed ages past, like the Jormungand serpent, or his handmaiden Hel. It was only Sleipnir Odinfather kept—only the gift Loki fashioned at his brother’s request and in his name.

How the old man welcomed Loki’s skill then, when he thought it Thor’s generosity and power at work.

But let Loki’s hand be known and there is no pleased reception or fragrant oil to rub the joints of his creations until they gleam. There is only the icy depths of the ocean, and cellars so deep they might as well be on Helheimr, the dead world after which Loki named his second creation.

 _Too dangerous,_ Odinfather chided him as they sent Hel down into that abyss, one silver piece at a time. An arm. A thigh. Her whirling, blind eyes. _Loki, you reach too far._

Loki was shamed then, and thought himself as foolish as Odinfather named him. In his workings, he had seen only the beauty of creation. He had seen only power and majesty and a terrible, glittering awe. He had not understood their danger, although he sensed a confusing wrongness in the way Odinfather drew back from his gifts with a horrified twist to his lips.

Perhaps it was not Loki’s workings that Odinfather feared, but their maker. Perhaps he saw Jotun brutality in Fenrir’s claws and Jormungand’s fangs. Perhaps he saw those grotesque, gigantic forms mimicked by Hel’s gruesome visage.

On the nights Loki dares to creep skyward—when he turns his face up to the ruined moorings of the Bifrost—he thinks that Odinfather was perhaps right to fear.

It was Fenrir the Allfather hated most of all: Loki’s third and final failed gift. He ordered the wolf destroyed in an instant, handing it over to Thor and Thor’s hammer while Loki stood stunned and silent in his brother’s shadow.

Whether Thor looked at him then, Loki does not know. He had eyes only for his father—for the stern disappointment glittering in Odinfather’s single eye.

What Loki knows is that Thor lifted the end of the chain from the ground where it fell when Loki tried unsuccessfully to hand the lead to their father. What he knows is the wolf lapping his hand one last time before being dragged away in a shower of metal and sparks.

He knows also that Thor found him in his rooms later, and laid a twisted lump of collar in his lap. As Loki fingered the charred metal, Thor’s hand settled on his shoulder ( _heavy; a crushing weight_ ) and Thor said, “There is no use in crying over metal, Brother. Come. I know a place where we can find women and song. And drink. You look like you could use a drink.”

Did Loki go with him? Perhaps. Probably. It was never in him to deny Thor anything—not to his face.

Thor, the golden son. Thor, the beloved warrior.

Thor, who apparently disobeyed the Odinfather in the matter of Fenrir’s destruction just as he has on so many other occasions. And he never spoke a word of it. He watched Loki mourn—he let him mourn—and he said nothing.

The years between that day and this have not been kind to Loki’s last and best-loved creation. Fenrir’s eyes glow only with banked fire, the flames guttering and low. When he first found Loki, rust flaked his silver pelt. One ear hung askew. His tail drooped.

Even so, he was a thing of beauty compared to Loki in those first few weeks. It’s hardly surprising, when Loki recalls his fall through rings of fire before he managed to halt his headlong descent, fetching up against hard earth and skidding over exposed, jagged black rocks. Then there was a timeless trek over barren wasteland—a torturous ascent up towering cliffs—until he reached this place, these caves.

Only a day’s journey from Asgard, and Loki is leagues too far from home. He’s eons too close.

The wolf has nursed him back to health. It has stolen food and water and even clothes, allowing him to regain some small semblance of his former dignity. Just as importantly, it has brought him images of the life he lost on his last and greatest gamble—to earn Odinfather’s love, to prove his loyalty. To distance himself from Thor forever before he allowed his instincts to drive him to an act for which he would never forgive himself.

The wolf has brought him sights and sounds: collections of its daily experience spent skulking around the underbelly of Asgard. It was meant as a spy—meant to watch and record and report the movements of the hated Jotuns—and report it does. Oh, the places Loki sees; the voices he hears. The familiar, longed-for rhythms of his childhood come back to him through Fenrir’s aid—blissful days when he was still foolish enough to believe he could earn Odinfather’s love. When he believed he could be worthy to stand by Thor’s right hand and guard him from all threats.

On this day, when the wolf slinks to Loki’s side and lays its head in his lap, for the first time Loki finds the palace in its flickering eyes. He sees the bustle of the kitchens from which he and Thor stole as children; he sees the halls decked with gold and crimson banners. He sees his brother, golden-haired and laughing with Sif on his arm.

A tiny hiss escapes his lips. He thought himself safe from this worm in his heart—the Bifrost gone, Thor trapped here away from the mortal creature who didn’t deserve him and wouldn’t have known what to do with him if he had gone to her.

“More,” he demands, tightening his hand in Fenrir’s scruff where he was stroking the wolf. “Show me more.”

But the wolf’s eyes flicker and roll, showing only a banked, red glow. Nothing more glimpsed on its sneaking journey. Nothing more to show.

“Tomorrow,” Loki says, keeping a tight hold on the wolf to illustrate the depth of his sincerity. “You will seek my brother. You will watch. And then you will return to me and share all that you have learned.”

Fenrir’s body shudders. A whine emerges from its throat—as rundown and rough-edged as the rest of him. But the tongue that laps out over Loki’s other hand is a promise to obey, and Loki releases the wolf grudgingly.

He does not know what he will do if his suspicions are correct.

He dare not even dream.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Thor dances attendance on Sif. He is courteous—courtly, even. She does not roll her eyes as she used to. She does not keep him back from her side with the sharp end of a spear. Things have changed between them.

Things have changed.

Loki snarls his frustration at the earthen sky of his new home and sends Fenrir out once more.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When Fenrir returns on the next night, there is a word in its eyes. It is a word Loki reads in the surge of activity in the palace’s high halls and the frenzy in the kitchens. He sees it in the new flags raised about the city—flags bearing Sif’s spear crossed with a hammer. He notes it in the seats lining the great hall, and the golden chalice of unity gleaming on its table before Odinfather’s great throne.

There are gifts piled in odd rooms. There are beasts from far realms penned in the stables. Every last guest chamber in Asgard is taken. A steady stream of nobles pour in through the palace gates.

Loki will put an end to this mockery, though. He will hew her asunder—not just the hair from her head as he did once before, but the flesh from her bones. He knows ways. Or perhaps … Perhaps he’ll simply touch her.

One loving grasp of his hand around Sif’s throat, and she won’t trouble his sleep any longer. Heimdall might have survived Loki’s unfettered touch, but Sif is no bridge keeper. Loki will hold her until she has frozen firm to the bones of the earth itself, and then he’ll take her spear in hand and shatter her into a thousand pieces.

Let Loki’s dimwitted, foolish brother plan his nuptial vows then.

“When?” he growls, seizing Fenrir by the scruff and shaking it. “ _When_ , damn you?”

Overhead and distant, like a whisper of a dream, he hears the bells begin to ring, and knows he is already too late.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

There are secret paths between the worlds. Loki studied them when he was young. He found forbidden roads and marked them in his mind. He bound those silent ways to himself, so that he might stand watch over any threat to Odinfather’s reign. To his brother’s reign, one day.

Even when it became clear to Loki that he would never be Thor’s equal in any eyes but his own ( _yes? and did you ever truly believe even that, magician?_ ), he watched and guarded.

The path he follows now runs not between two worlds but through one. It slips sideways through the shadows of Asgard: a worn, dusty place that has seen nothing but the lonely steps of a wolf in centuries.

But Loki walks here now with Fenrir at his heels. The wolf will serve as a guard for the path back, although Loki does not expect this to go poorly for him—he has studied Thor’s habits for the past fortnight, and married life has not changed his brother one whit. Thor will carouse until late, drinking and telling stories of battles won with his idiot friends, and when the moon has already begun its downward descent, he will finally allow Sif to take him by the hand and lead him to her bridal suite.

There, after what Loki can only imagine is a stunning display of athleticism and inebriate whoring, Thor will sleep beside his bride. He has always slept soundly, as Loki is in a position to know. He slept soundly enough all those years ago, that first night after Loki understood his place in Asgard. He slept while Loki stood over his bed, trying to decide whether he hated Thor enough to kill him, whether Thor’s death would change the way Odinfather looked at his lesser-loved, ill-favored son.

But it wasn’t hate Loki felt as he watched Thor’s slow, even breaths. It isn’t hate he’s ever felt, and that’s his greatest tragedy.

The bridal suite is silent when he steps from the path, his body painlessly regaining substance and shape. He has seen Fenrir emerge from one of its jaunts before, and he knows how he must look—like a phantom gathering itself from particles of ice and dust. Fitting. It’s fitting.

One breath, two, and Loki stands solidly in Sif’s bedroom. He has come unarmed in any obvious fashion, but he is not toothless. He will never be toothless—not now that he knows his hateful, shameful heritage.

The room is dark, but not so dark that Loki can’t see Mjölnir resting on a stand by the foot of the bed, within easy grasping distance should Thor need assistance in the night. Loki eyes the great hammer warily as he moves around the canopied bed toward the left side—Thor prefers the right; Sif will be here. She will be quiet and still, and then Loki will touch her. He’ll freeze the scream in her throat, and then explain with calm, rational whispers, why Thor will wake in the morning to find himself in want of a new wife before the customary month of celebration has finished.

Loki eases open the gauzy curtains framing the bed, and then smiles grimly to himself as he sees that his assumption was correct. There is Thor, lying on his stomach in a sprawl on the far side of the bed. Loki could drop a frost giant on him and he still would not stir.

Sif lies closer, her hair spread around her head in a dark, silken cloud. She’s bare beneath the sheets—Loki is sure of it—and somehow that knowledge drives the anger churning in his stomach to new, unexplored levels. Careful to remain silent—Thor sleeps like a stone, but Sif has grown cautious since Loki took her gleaming, golden hair—Loki reaches down. His fingertips brush Sif’s upturned throat—gentle, so gentle—and her skin wavers.

Loki frowns, twitching his fingers again, and watches her throat ripple like water in the rain.

 _A trap_ , he understands finally, but the knowledge comes too late to avoid Thor’s sudden roll and lunge for Loki’s wrist. Sif’s image vanishes when Thor rolls through it, but Loki only has a moment to register the absence before Thor has jerked him forward onto the bed and rolled them both over.

Loki ends his tumble on his back with one of Thor’s hands around his throat and the other clenching his wrist. Thor looms over him in the darkened room, the faint light shining off his bare chest and hair. Loki’s heart beats faster, a weakness he ignores as he struggles to escape his brother’s grasp. Thor moves again, sliding one thigh over Loki’s body and settling his weight down on Loki’s stomach, pinning him as irrefutably as Mjölnir’s weight pinned him on the bridge. At the four corners of the room, torches ignite and spill blinding brilliance across the floor, making Loki wince and narrow his eyes.

“For a dead god,” Thor’s voice rumbles, “You look surprisingly well, Brother.”

“Unhand me,” Loki hisses, drawing his lips back from his teeth in a snarl as his vision begins to clear.

Predictably enough, Thor merely gives him a dimwitted smile in return. There is nothing predictable or comprehensible in the way his hand shifts around Loki’s throat, though. Shock settles over Loki like a rime of ice as Thor’s thumb rubs along his jaw in a slow, meaningful drag. His breath shallows alarmingly.

“I would have to be a fool to release you now that I finally have you in my grasp,” Thor observes. “And, as blind as I have been, I think we both know I am not that man.”

Loki summons up a mocking laugh that he doesn’t truly feel.

“Speak for yourself, _Brother_ ,” he sneers. “But I know better. I’ve played you for a fool a thousand times over, and you never suspected. You didn’t think your tame magician had it in him, did you?”

Instead of flaring into one of his customary rages, Thor smiles more broadly and says, apropos of nothing, “You are wearing far too many layers.”

Loki stares uncomprehendingly at Thor’s grinning, jovial face for a moment, and then widens his eyes as Thor jerks and jostles his surcoat, forcing the heavy fabric open. Thor cannot possibly be tearing at the fastenings on Loki’s breeches, or unbuckling the leather cuirass from around Loki’s chest. It’s madness to imagine the intent in Thor’s eyes; insanity to believe Thor even wants this from him, let alone that Thor is willing to indulge his desire.

No. No, Loki can’t allow Thor to drag him down like this. He can’t allow Thor to drag them both down, and Asgard with them.

Thor’s left hand is still wrapped around Loki’s throat, but his fingers have loosened from a cage into a bewildering caress. More importantly, he’s had to release Loki’s wrist in order to begin the arduous process of disrobing him, which leaves Loki more than free to set both hands against Thor’s chest and _push_.

He doesn’t bother using his muscles—he would have a better chance at moving a mountain than his brother. Instead, he sends itching, numbing power out from his fingertips into Thor’s bare skin. The same panicked drive for self-preservation that infected him when he sent the Destroyer after his brother on Midgard, and then again when he battled him on the Bifrost, fills Loki again now.

If he had the Casket at his call now, he would blast Thor into ice flecks across the ceiling of this chamber, and damn the pain to himself. At least he would be whole and unbroken enough to mourn.

As it is, Loki must settle for his own innate powers, which do not seem to heed his fear as much as he needs them to. Instead of the blast of ice that he means to create, pale blue frost spreads out from the points of contact between them in a poisonous rush. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to make Thor utter a surprised, hurt bark. He releases Loki’s throat in order to slap at his chest, and Loki seizes the opportunity to transfigure his body into mist. Mist is easy enough to pour off the edge of the bed, leaving Thor to collapse into the sudden space, but a difficult substance to maintain, and Loki feels himself losing control of the transfiguration almost immediately.

He hits the floor as an Asgardian again, and promptly wraps space and light around the contours of his body. This trick of invisibility is among the first of the misdirections Loki learned, and it comes to him easily. Casting his reflection inches to his right with an absent thought, he hastily rises and hurries for his secret, unseen path while sending his mirror image toward the door.

Let Thor chase Loki’s shadow while Loki flees to regroup.

It’s amazing how quickly Thor worked to remove Loki’s clothes, and Loki is distracted by the gape of his surcoat and the cool, breezy sensation where his cuirass hangs askew. When he feels along his side, he finds one of the buckles broken—snapped open by Thor’s brute, thuggish strength, and Loki is going to take the cost for a replacement out on his brother’s hide. Or perhaps Sif’s hide.

She helped set this trap. She must have. After all, Thor is her husband. These are her chambers—the _bridal_ chambers, reserved for Thor’s chosen bride since his birth.

Hatred snarls through Loki as he nears his escape route, speeding his steps all the more. He’s hurtling toward the path now, moving as swiftly as he can without potent magical assistance, and it comes as quite a shock when he crashes headfirst into what feels like a very solid barrier.

Dazed by the impact, Loki collapses to the stone floor and lies there uncomprehendingly. The ceiling seems to spin in his field of vision, an enchanting illusion of Asgard’s night sky with its myriad stars and colors. Loki remembers counting stars with his brother when they were younger. He remembers Thor boasting how many worlds among them he was going to conquer and rule—“with you at my side, of course,” he used to say, and oh, how that puffed up Loki’s chest in those early days, back when he was too young to understand that such things could never come to pass.

Not for one such as him. Not unless Loki ripped Asgard apart to _make_ it happen.

Distantly, Loki hears Thor rise from the bed and come toward him. He rolls his eyes to the side and sees Thor brushing frost from his chest as he approaches. As Thor crouches down beside him, Loki tries to shift away and can’t convince his muscles to work.

“Did you truly think I didn’t know about your secret paths?” Thor asks with a rich thread of insulting humor in his voice.

“How?” Loki demands, forcing the word through numb, tingling lips. Shock, rather than true cold.

“Did you believe the wolf reported only to you?” Thor replies. “After I saved it from the scrap heap all those years ago?” He shakes his head as the news of just how deeply Loki has been betrayed sinks in. “Arrogance, Brother. That is your greatest flaw.”

Loki tries to scramble away when Thor reaches out, but he’s still too scrambled from the jolt of running into that wall to do more than shift feebly. He’s no more than dead weight as Thor lifts him from the floor with one hand and tears his surcoat from his shoulders with the other. Loki manages to bestir himself slightly at the loss, although his struggles are pitiful enough that he doesn’t even inconvenience Thor as Thor finishes pulling him from his cuirass like a ravenous fisherman scraping meat from a lobster shell. Loki’s simple black tunic is taken from him almost as an afterthought, leaving his chest bare and chilled.

Chilled…

Loki lifts his hands, reaching for Thor’s throat this time ( _he won’t hurt his brother badly, just enough to gain some space; just enough to grant himself escape_ ), but before he can manage the attack, Thor lifts him completely from the floor and tosses him onto the bed. Loki lands on his back, bounces on the mattress twice, and then gets his hands beneath his body to shove himself into a seated position. Thor is there before he can do more, catching both of Loki’s wrists and manacling him with the confining grip of a single hand.

As Loki struggles against his brother’s hold, Thor reaches overhead, feeling for something by the top of the headboard. Loki catches a glimpse of a thin, shining gold line dangling from his brother’s hand and then heated metal seems to slither over his throat. Thor pulls the chain tight almost immediately, jerking Loki’s head back and cutting off all but the thinnest supply of air. As Loki fights for air, Thor mutters something under his breath—an incantation, spoken in a voice that echoes and pulses strangely in Loki’s mind. The metal pulls even tighter for an instant, then relaxes again: light and delicate as a spider web.

Thor releases him, but doesn’t back away. He kneels half beside and half over Loki, looking down at him and waiting. Something about his expression—or perhaps about the warmth of the chain around his throat—makes Loki hesitate before continuing his attack. Instead of bringing his hands up to Thor, he reaches for his own neck—tentatively at first, then with more frantic insistence.

When Loki brushes the gossamer chain of gold encircling his throat, the pads of his fingers burn and he has to jerk his hand away. But as little as he cares for pain, he cares even less for being tethered—and he can feel from the tug against his throat that the chain is somehow attached to the head of the bed. He reaches again with a snarl, ready to tear the fragile gold links from his throat, but with a doubled, looping motion, Thor winds two more fine chains about each of Loki’s wrists. The metal blurs into itself to form unbroken, seamless wholes—dwarven work; Loki will slaughter the lot for aiding his dimwitted brother against him.

He clenches his hands into fists, wrenching first one and then the other forward. The force of those wrenches should be more than enough to snap the length of chain tethering him thrice over to the headboard, but instead there is a high, ringing sound as the delicate links strain and strain… and hold.

Well enough. If Loki cannot break the chains as they are with brute force, then he will freeze them brittle. He will sap the heat from the thin metal links and tear himself free from their crumbling ruin.

He reaches again for the deep, icy core at his heart, and the power runs through his hands like water through a bottomless bucket. No, it is worse. Stray droplets would cling to such a bucket, but Loki’s mental hands seem coated with a thick, noxious oil. The power beads and rolls away from his grasp, leaving him untouched by so much as a single flake of frost.

In a rising panic, Loki reaches again—this time for his Asgardian training. The tricks which used to so entertain his easily amused brother were not all he learned, and he has guiles and arts strong enough to shatter the chains binding him and the bed along with them. But in the corner of his mind that used to resound with light and illusion, he finds nothing but dust and shadow. An empty, powerless waste, as dark and cold as the barrens of Jotunheim.

It should not be possible for the dwarves to so completely restrain something of Loki’s begetting. Perhaps one side—perhaps the monster in him—but there are reasons why Nidavellir pays tribute to Asgard. The wretched, crawling dwarves never could learn to master their Asgardian betters.

 _Ah,_ whispers a snide voice in the back of Loki’s mind, _but you are not Asgardian, are you? You are low, a changeling, a deformed cuckoo. Why should dwarven work not bind you as surely as any other Jotun?_

For an instant, he believes it. For an instant, the shame he must continually battle swells up to overcome him.

But no Jotun ever mastered the call of fire as Loki has. No Jotun has learned the trick of bending light and space. Odinfather’s rearing of him has changed him that much. It has given him enough to be more than he ought, if not quite sufficient to achieve his dreams.

No. Impossible as it seems, this binding was dwarven work at the start, but its current strength is somehow Thor’s doing. And Loki is no match for his overbearing, boorish brother. Not when he’s wearing this… this _collar_.

He drops his hands, and the sighing song of the chain grates on his ears.

“How?” he demands. “How was this chain fashioned?”

“There are other magicians in Asgard than you, Brother,” Thor replies with something that sounds horribly like pity. “And bindings strong enough to hold even the prince of the Jotun.”

Loki stills, momentarily stunned by the title. But only momentarily. He should, after all, have expected no less.

 _Odinfather told him._

Shame burns through Loki with the fire of poison. He wants to twist and hide his eyes; he wants to will his body back to mist and seep through the crack beneath the door. He wants to snarl and break Thor’s beautiful, perfect face into thousands of pieces for daring to look at him like that, for daring to admit his knowledge, for even now daring to touch Loki’s misborn stomach and chest with oversized, clumsy hands.

“How dare you!” Loki spits—ineloquent, but words have been driven from him. He starts to sit up, meaning to move as far from the mad barbarian in bed with him as the chains will allow, and grits his teeth against their ringing sigh. Before he has more than shifted to the side, Thor has moved his hand from Loki’s chest, darting it out to grip his upper arm instead. When Loki tries at least to look away, Thor traps his gaze as well, locking him in place with eyes the color of a Jotun flame.

“You cannot dream what I would dare,” Thor breathes, and drags Loki’s body against his broad chest.

Loki snarls—if Thor demands a kiss ( _but why? what reason for such madness?_ ), he will borrow the nature of his wolf and bite. But although there is little enough air between their lips, it is not Loki’s mouth for which Thor reaches. Loki’s eyes widen, shocked, as Thor’s hand pushes into his opened breeches.

“Barbarian,” he barks, reaching for Thor’s face with his free hand. He cannot overpower Asgard’s chosen prince in a physical contest, but his fingers are weapon enough to claw out an eye. Thor may even thank him for it, once he has healed: it will be one more way for him to be the golden, true son. It will be one more means by which Thor and Odinfather may stand united against the Jotun outcast in their midst.

Thor must have expected some such attack, however, because he releases Loki’s arm to catch his hand instead. When Loki brings his other hand up in reply, Thor murmurs a low string of words and the chains encircling Loki’s wrists writhe to life. Links swim through the air like liquid snakes to join one chain with the other—serpent devouring its own tail—and then shrink, forcing Loki’s wrists together in front of his chest. He struggles to part them again, but the thin length of chain now joining them is as unbreakable as the longer lines tethering him to the bed.

Thor grins as he releases Loki’s hand and resettles his fingers at Loki’s waist.

“You did not think I would invite a wolf to my bed without first ensuring that I had a muzzle to hold him, did you, Brother?” Thor asks with a chuckle. “That would have been lax of me, indeed.”

“Invite?” Loki snarls as he does his best to shift himself from his current location atop Thor’s lap. His efforts to escape are not terribly successful, but at least Thor is having too much difficulty holding onto him to continue his attempts to explore the inside of Loki’s breeches. “You invite nothing. You _take_ , just as you always have.” Then, on a spur of inspiration, he adds, “What would father say, if he knew we were here together?”

“I imagine he would congratulate me for trapping the wolf that has been skulking about our sheepfolds and farms,” Thor replies easily. “And I did invite you—I sent word with Fenrir. I assume you received my message, since you are come here, armored and ready for mischief.”

Odinfather’s duplicity and perversion is no true surprise—he has already thoroughly debased and discarded Loki, what is one more disgrace?—but Loki cannot credit the other. Thor has no subtlety to him. Therefore, he is either lying outright or he speaks of a message never delivered.

His capture of Loki tonight has been nothing but another instance of Thor’s improbable good fortune. The chains have likely been waiting on the off-chance Loki would appear. Thor perhaps bears them everywhere with him, as defense against a magician’s strike.

 _But the trap,_ Loki whispers to himself. _The Sif illusion, to lure you close…_

Coincidence. Nothing more. Perhaps Sif made the illusion herself, to escape her brutish husband’s company for a time.

His voice is scornful as he says, “I received no message.”

“No word of a wedding?” Thor questions. His smile widens as Loki’s struggles momentarily quiet in the face of his surprise. “No sights and sounds of my blessed nuptials?”

“And who have you wed, Brother?” Loki sneers, clinging to his protective disdain. “Midgard is far without the Bifrost’s reach. Your pet will grow old and die before you find your way back to her side.”

The question is meant to prod at old wounds, but Thor’s eyes do no more than sharpen with satisfaction. “My bride is Sif, she of the golden hair that was. You do remember her, do you not?”

There seems no advantage in maintaining his pretense of ignorance, so Loki abandons it to say, “Wed barely two weeks and already straying from your lady’s bed? Have you ever desired something longer than the time it takes to rut?”

“I have,” Thor declares with a quiet, intense sincerity that gnaws on Loki’s insides.

He’ll kill her, whoever she is. He’ll strew her innards throughout the nine realms, Bifrost or no.

Then Thor continues, “And I mean to have you now. And to keep you.”

There is no comprehending Thor’s meaning. As thick skulled and brutish as Loki has observed his brother to be, Thor has never hinted at this level of low perversion. Perhaps, if he didn’t know, Loki might credit the thought. But Thor has given him his title: he has relegated Loki back to his shameful, base heritage.

No sane Asgardian would ever love a Jotun. Bed one, perhaps, as a momentary lark: to give himself a mocking tale to spread around the great hall after a feast. Loki has heard such boasts himself a-times, when the winter winds howled about the eaves and fire crackled merrily in the hearth.

 _Lo,_ the mighty warrior would say with a laugh, _how eagerly the mighty Jotun wolf becomes the bitch, once set on its back._

But this from Thor… No, never. Even now, Loki cannot credit his brother with such petty malice.

It occurs to him then that Thor knows Loki’s other secret—that Thor has somehow uncovered his futile, dreaming thoughts. Thor knows and he is repulsed and laughing at Loki even now. He is mocking his weak, impossible longing.

Yes, now Loki can believe it of his brother. Thor’s character and position would insist that he repudiate Loki’s desires in as public and hurtful a way possible. There can be no suspicions among the Asgardians that Thor returns Loki’s affections, even in the smallest way. There can be no doubts that Thor is one of them, that he despises Loki and considers him no more than a toy to be used and then discarded.

Tomorrow, once they are done here, it will be Thor standing up in the hall. It will be Loki’s panting, desperate cries described to the assembled warriors—men and women Loki grew to manhood with, whom he has always admired and loved and near-worshiped.

Oh, how they will laugh.

Stung by the knowledge of his future debasement, Loki redoubles his struggles. He thrashes his body from side to side, snapping his head back and setting the chains to their maddening song.

“Be still!” Thor demands as he labors to hold Loki tight.

But Loki, powerless though he is, has discovered some small alchemy in the extremities of his desperation. He has transfigured himself into a whirlwind, wild and whipping and furious. Thor may ( _will_ ) bed him eventually, but his words of the easily conquered Jotun changeling will be a lie when he speaks them. No matter how direly Loki craves this, he will make them a lie.

With a growl, Thor looses Loki with one hand, and then thrusts his fingers past the gaping fastenings on Loki’s breeches. Loki bucks, breath coming fast and light, but Thor is determined this time and pushes his questing hand deep enough to grasp what he seeks.

 _No,_ Loki thinks with something that feels horribly like despair as his brother’s fingers close around his manhood. He gathers himself for a stronger surge of struggles, and then—at the warning squeeze of Thor’s fingers—drags himself to a tense stillness. Every muscle in his body quivers with the need to twist and thrash, but the low, vibrating tension in his stomach is worse. Thor’s next stroke is gentler: a teasing, caressing tug that curls unwelcome warmth through Loki’s body.

“Better,” Thor rumbles, sliding his other hand around to palm Loki’s shoulder blade. He adjusts his hand where it’s wedged in Loki’s breeches ( _stretching and tearing the fabric; Loki’s clothes are going to be useless after tonight_ ), and takes a firmer hold on Loki’s rising manhood. This time, when he strokes, he rubs a thumb roughly over the sensitive head and forces a hiss from Loki’s lips.

“I knew you would come,” Thor observes as he continues to tease and stroke Loki’s increasingly stiff length. His voice is low, almost a purr, and Loki feels little enough like a wolf. A mouse, perhaps, trapped and trembling in the claws of a velvet-pelted lion. “I knew the tales of my marriage would bring you forth from wherever you have been holding yourself. I knew you would come here, intent on your mischief.”

Could it have been a ruse? Loki wonders wildly as he bites the inside of his mouth to keep from moaning. Could Thor have crafted such an elaborate deception to lure Loki close for this humiliating capture? Surely he has not the devious mind necessary for such a plot, but there are those among his cronies who would aid him.

Sif—that haughty, horse-faced petticoat in breeches—might have spun this deception easily enough.

He is not wed, then. Not that it matters to Loki. Wed or not, Thor clearly means to destroy him.

The thought of what his life will be like after this night rouses Loki’s sluggish will to resist, and he finally remembers that he’s meant to be struggling. He can’t manage more than a languid roll of his body, and even that is driven more by the arousal Thor’s touch is stirring than by resistance. But Loki has words. He still has that much.

“I will tear your… throat…throat out… if you…do not let me… let me go.”

Thor’s response is an amused, rich chuckle as he reaches even further between Loki’s legs ( _is Loki actually spreading to give Thor room? surely not, not of his own volition_ ) and trails his fingertips over Loki’s aching balls.

“S-stop,” Loki groans weakly. His head falls back so that he can stare at the ceiling instead of into his brother’s smug, sky-blue eyes.

“No.”

Thor’s refusal drives another moan from Loki’s throat, and his body rolls again as Thor finally puts his mouth on him—as Thor bites down on the extended line of Loki’s throat, working the skin hard enough to bruise. It’s silent in the room then—for long, torturous minutes—leaving Loki nothing to concentrate on but the feel of Thor’s hand in his breeches and the hot ache of Thor’s lips on his throat. It’s quiet enough that Loki can hear the rustling of fabric, and the creak of the mattress beneath their combined weight, and the unsteady, aroused sound of his own breathing. The chains make their whispered song, subdued and almost hypnotic in their sweet sighs.

Loki has never felt less like a Jotun. There is nothing of ice in him now, only fire. Only the heat of Thor’s body beneath and before him, and the flames of desire licking against the inside of his groin and belly. Ruined. He is ruined.

And tomorrow, all of Asgard will know it.

A single tear slips from his eye, running halfway down his cheek before dissolving unseen into the air.

Perhaps Thor senses that Loki is properly subdued and broken all the same, though, because he lifts his mouth from Loki’s throat and tugs his hand free from Loki’s breeches. When he draws the same hand down the center of Loki’s chest, his fingers feel slick, making Loki uncomfortably aware of how damp the crotch of his breeches are with his pre-spending. He has always leaked copiously before his climax—enough so that his bedmates have commented in the past. Perhaps it is a Jotun trait, perhaps just a discrepancy unique to Loki himself. Yet he cannot remember having ever spent quite so much without the benefit of a climax before.

Loki waits for Thor to comment on it—to name him a woman, a bitch in heat—but when he speaks, Thor’s only comment is, “You are a thing of such beauty, Loki.”

Those words are worse than any abuse Loki could have conceived of on his own, and his chest twists with vicious shame.

“Don’t,” he says sharply, lowering his head again and allowing his chin to brush his chest as he looks down at the glistening, shaming line Thor’s touch has left on him. “You have me bested—you have your Jotun toy—but if you have even a modicum of honor in you, you will not speak that way.” His voice trembles and he has to take a moment before he adds, “You have never been openly cruel, my Lord. Do not start now.”

“My Lord?” Thor repeats, sounding at once both surprised and hurt. His hand—the dry one—brushes Loki’s cheek in a mockery of tenderness. “When have we ever had need of titles between us, Brother?”

“Don’t!” Loki insists again, tossing his head up and away from the hurtful touch. He forces himself to meet Thor’s eyes, twisting his own features into as close an approximation of scorn and hate as he can muster. “Mount your prize and have it done. I am sure your friends are waiting with baited breath to hear how prettily the monster moaned.”

Thor’s expression darkens, and before Loki can blink, Thor’s hand is clenched around his throat. His fingers tremble with what Loki senses is the urge to tighten: to crush.

Good. Better death than this defiling shame.

“You will not speak of yourself that way again,” Thor grounds out. “Or I will silence you by any means necessary.”

“Why?” Loki replies with a conjured sneer. “Does it offend your delicate sensibilities to hear just what it is that you bring to your bed?” As Thor’s nostrils flare, Loki adds, “I hear they rut like dogs on Jotunheim. Is that how you want me? Shall I howl when you take me, my Lord?”

It isn’t a growl that Thor lets out this time, but a roar. He shoves Loki backward, putting him on his back and then covering his mouth with one oversized hand. Loki can smell himself on his brother’s fingers, their scents mingling, and his manhood throbs between his legs.

“You are no hound,” Thor decrees in a wrathful rumble as the weight of his body crushes Loki into the bed. “You are my consort and brother, and I will have the tongue of any man or woman who speaks otherwise.”

Thor’s insistence is confusing—Loki has never known his brother to be so capable a dissembler, which seems to indicate that he is in earnest. As impossible as it seems, he does not mean to shame Loki’s name before the assembled warriors.

Loki swallows, indicating that he wishes to speak, and Thor frowns at him.

“Your word to keep such hurtful lies from your lips,” Thor insists.

He might as well ask the moon not to shine, or the frost not to sting the tender buds of an unprotected crop, but Loki does his best to project earnest remorse and repentance with his eyes. It’s a gaze he practiced often in the mirror growing up, and one that has always worked wonders on softening Thor’s demands on him. It works as well now, as the pressure of Thor’s hand first lessens and then vanishes.

“I am Jotun,” Loki says as soon as he has the breath to do so. “You cannot make me other than that.”

“And would not, even if I could,” Thor rejoins immediately.

There is no sense in that declaration, and Loki is disoriented by the sheer impossibility of it. He’s in no condition to hide his discomposure, and the lines of Thor’s face soften into an expression that makes Loki’s chest twist uncomfortably.

“Loki, the most joyful moment of my life was the moment father told me who you are. Do you not see? Nothing stands between us now. Even father had to agree to that, once I had pleaded my case to the witenagemot.”

“You—you what?” Loki rasps, horrified.

“I petitioned to take you as my consort. There were objections, of course, but… I am my father’s heir, am I not? If I cannot use my title to obtain that which I desire beyond all else, then what use is it? And I would not have been content without you at my side.”

There are stories hidden beneath those words, but Thor is not a gifted dissembler, and Loki has always been adept at picking out the truths Thor will not speak aloud. No matter how unbelievable they are.

“You threatened to cede the crown?” Loki demands.

Thor’s quiet lack of a denial as he looms over Loki is all the confirmation Loki requires. He laughs hollowly, with no real sense of joy.

The fool. The utter, blind fool.

“You—I take back my words. You are no fool. You are an imbecile.”

“I think not. I have you, don’t I?” Thor sounds—and looks—supremely confident in his possession, and rage boils beneath Loki’s breast.

Thor is destroying himself—he is dragging all of Asgard down with him, and using Loki to do it. A Jotun standing at the right hand of Asgard’s future king?

Loki will not—cannot—allow it. He has proved to himself already how unfit he is to shoulder that burden.

“You have _nothing_ ,” he snarls. “Take this body if you must, but the instant I am freed from these—” he jerks his hands, setting that sighing song free in the room once more “—you will hold nothing but a memory. I am no kept wolf, and I will not play one for you.”

Thor looks disappointed… for a moment. Then he brightens again, smiling as he rests his weight more firmly on Loki’s body. “Thank you for the warning, Brother,” he says, burying the fingers of one hand in Loki’s hair. “I will be sure to keep my wolf muzzled, then. Until he comes obediently to my hand.”

The words fall into precise, crystalline patterns in Loki’s head, and he understands, with a flush of unwelcome dismay, what Thor sees in him. He understands why his brother would have taken such lengths to ensure his complete and utter possession. His submission.

Thor does not desire a consort. He desires the power of a Jotun sorcerer. A tame wolf, to set upon his enemies.

As hurtful as the realization is, Loki recognizes in it the slight widening of a door through which he can wriggle back into the darkness. One small concession, and he can crawl gracelessly back to his cave, where he will be able to lick his wounds in peace.

“If that is what you desire, I will swear fealty,” he says quickly, refusing to be lulled by the sensation of Thor’s fingers combing through his hair. “Ask any oath you wish; bind my service with whatever wards you see fit. Only cease this charade, and my arts—whatever power I have—are yours.”

Thor bends close, perhaps to judge Loki’s sincerity. His nose brushes alongside Loki’s. His hand tightens in Loki’s hair, holding his head still. Thor’s eyes, Loki realizes, burn with a mirror of the ice that runs through his own being. Blue and electric with the thunder he calls to heel.

Thor holds Loki’s gaze with those pale flecks of ice long enough for a slight shiver to tremble through Loki’s limbs, and then murmurs, “It is not your arts I wish to employ.” He smiles, wolfish himself in the moment, before clarifying, “Not your arcane arts.”

Loki swallows uncertainly, body and mind warring with each other. His frame cannot possibly be strong enough to contain such disparate, intense needs. The yearning to accept Thor’s words as true—to accept his touch as necessary and wondrous—cannot co-exist alongside the awareness of what he is, that he cannot have what Thor offers, that they must not do this thing.

In his confusion, it’s instinct to pull away as Thor moves in even closer. Thor’s grip on Loki’s hair keeps him still, though, and a moment later Thor’s mouth is on his.

The press of Thor’s lips is gentle at first—a coaxing pressure that Loki ignores despite the trembling warmth in his groin. As Loki continues to keep his own lips firmly shut, the pressure deepens into a demand. It isn’t until Loki tries to turn his head to the side that Thor growls, though, biting down on Loki’s mouth with a sudden roughness that startles him into a cry.

Thor is on him immediately, tongue past Loki’s lips and fingers clenched tightly around Loki’s jaw, keeping his mouth open wide. He twines his other hand more firmly in Loki’s hair, ignoring Loki’s futile, furious squirms beneath him.

Gradually, as Thor satisfies himself that Loki can’t do anything to prevent the kiss, his mouth grows almost playful. He thrusts his tongue deeper, hunting down Loki’s tongue and pinning it to the floor of his mouth. He draws Loki’s lower lip between his teeth and favors it with deliberate, teasing nips before surging forward again himself. He kisses Loki with deep, sensual hunger—kisses him, Loki realizes with a flush of infuriated embarrassment, as though Loki is a woman.

Still, Loki can’t deny that Thor knows what he’s doing—he should; he’s had plenty of practice with the whores that flock at his feet. It’s torture being held down and forced to accept his attention. It feels like a punishment, to feel this and to be unable to respond: to be unable to throw common sense and duty to the winds and revel in the simple pleasures of the flesh as Thor seems content to do.

Thor was blessed with many gifts at birth, but intelligence and a grasp of the larger framework are not among them.

Finally, Thor lifts his head and allows Loki to suck in deep, heady gasps of air. Loki’s lips tingle. The inside of his mouth tastes of his brother.

It tastes of Thor and something else. Something… sweeter.

Loki stiffens as he realizes whose scent mingles inexorably in his head with that sickly, fertile taste. A kiss stolen, he remembers, when he held her hair in one hand and an enchanted blade of his own making in the other.

Sif. Sif has had her mouth on Thor.

That bitch.

He snarls, coming alive and violent again, and Thor looks perplexed as he gets his hand on Loki’s throat ( _Loki is going to wear a necklace of bruises tomorrow; he’ll be lucky if he can speak above a low rasp_ ) and holds him down. The chain, caught beneath Thor’s palm, grinds musically against Loki’s skin.

“Must you insist on making this as unpleasant as possible?” Thor grouses, frowning down at him. Loki’s hands twitch where they’re caught between his own chest and Thor’s, nails digging into whatever bit of his brother’s flesh he can reach and scratching. It doesn’t even earn him a flinch.

“I can taste her on you,” he seethes.

“What, Sif?” Thor replies with not even so much as a hesitation to process Loki’s accusation. “She’s my wife. Of course you can taste her.”

Rage wars with horror and shock within the vault of Loki’s chest. It appears that he has incorrectly assumed Thor’s marriage to be a fabric of lies, and just as incorrectly judged his own response to that assumption. He thought that Thor’s wedded status didn’t matter to him anymore, back when he decided that Fenrir had fed him deceitful scraps concocted to lure him here. But it seems it does matter after all. It matters quite a lot, actually.

To think that it was not a ruse—to think that Thor has been wed to Sif for weeks, that he had her again and again, and now means to have Loki as well—that he means to take Loki as an afterthought to his nuptials—is unbearable.

With an inarticulate, infuriated yell that does nothing to mute the shame in his chest, Loki thrashes even more violently beneath his brother’s bulk.

“Be still,” Thor thunders, but Loki heeds Thor no better now than he did the first time he was so commanded. Thor has no leverage to reach for Loki’s sensitive bits in this position, either—not locked together as they are. He could try, of course, but he would have to lift himself from Loki to do so, and that would give Loki the space he needs to truly attack.

After a few moments of intense struggle, Thor seems to realize as much. His expression tightens, eyes narrowing, and an instant later, he tightens his grip on Loki’s throat. His isn’t cutting off quite enough air to threaten unconsciousness, but the hold is more than sufficient to weaken Loki’s efforts.

“I had planned to discuss this with you another time,” Thor says, speaking calmly but quickly, “But if you insist on hearing it now, then so be it. Wedding Sif was father’s condition for taking you as consort. Although I admit, even knowing how you would take the news, I did not resist. As is tradition, Sif and I will celebrate our vows every sunset for the next month. As is also tradition—and as you must know, Brother—we share a nuptial kiss before each evening’s feast. It is that kiss which you taste on my lips, nothing more.”

As though Loki is to believe that—believe that Thor has kept to his own bed, alone, for the past fortnight.

“You admit to a wife, and yet here you lie,” Loki rasps, forcing the words through his constrained throat. “Go bed your bride, my Lord… If you are man enough to master her.”

The intended jab flies astray of its mark as Thor offers Loki a grim smile and replies, “I will. She awaits me in her chambers. But I will not come this night, as I have not come any night since we have been wed, and she knows the reason.”

Loki cannot comprehend Thor’s sudden chastity, so he chooses to ignore that part of his brother’s explanation and focus on the humiliation of Sif’s knowledge.

She knows. Of course she knows. If Thor took his desires to the witenagemot, then all on Asgard know. They know of Thor’s dishonorable, base intentions and of the pet he means to keep.

It is a wonder all of Asgard has not broken out in open rebellion at the prospect.

Yet Thor sees nothing wrong with what he proposes—he continues just as blind and stupid as ever. He looks almost proud as his hand eases into a gentler hold around Loki’s neck. His eyes bear the stony sheen of determination as he leans in close to nuzzle at Loki’s cheek.

“I would bed you first,” Thor breathes against Loki’s skin. “I _will_ lie with Sif, and we will make heirs for my father’s crown, but I will have what I desire first. I will have _you_. Sif will abide.”

Loki is not as certain as Thor on that count—the Sif he recalls has never been the sort to accept the role Thor envisions for her—but he’s also less than concerned with Sif’s view on the subject. She can rot in Helheim, for all he cares. Just so long as she does it away from Loki. Away from Thor.

“ _I_ will not abide,” he insists, before realizing it’s as good as an admission that he does, in fact, crave the same low coupling that Thor requires of him. It’s an admission that he craves more.

The pleased light in Thor’s eyes announces that those admissions did not escape his notice, but his voice is still stern as he says, “Unless Jotun males are able to bear offspring, you _will_ abide, Brother. I know my duty. I owe a legacy to the might of Asgard, and Sif will make it so. You... you, Brother, will offer me other fruits.”

“Yes,” Loki sneers, sickened by the thought of being forced to serve—of _sharing_. “I am certain you will think of many things for your Jotun dog to do for you, my Lord.”

A growl rumbles Thor’s throat. Anger flashes in his eyes. For a moment, Loki stares up into the face of the Jotun Killer—remote as a star and wrathful as unbridled fire—and trembles inside. Then Thor’s expression thaws. His eyes soften.

“I would punish you for that if I did not know you believe it,” he says. “But I will teach you otherwise. I will have you in my bed and at my right hand both, and things will be as they ought. You will be home, and safe, and mine.”

It’s a pretty lie. And perhaps Thor even believes it… now. When he has sated his hunger, though, even he must admit the pollution in Loki’s veins. Even he must turn his back on the monster in Asgard’s glittering midst.

Loki cannot allow himself to warm his hands by his brother’s fire. Not when he knows that he will be cast sprawling back into the dark soon enough.

“I am not yours,” he snaps. “You cannot cage the Jotun. You cannot control them. You cannot control me.”

“For tonight,” Thor replies with a slow smile, “I will be content with bedding you. The rest will follow as it may.”

“No.”

“No?” Thor echoes, raising one eyebrow. “Hardly the biting reply I expected. You must be warming to my charms already.”

Loki splutters, wracking his brain for a reply that’s more coherent than a string of swears, and then yelps as Thor lifts up and rolls him onto his stomach in the same movement. Loki’s hands are still awkwardly bound, but he positions them and starts to push himself up all the same, then forgets all about his hands in favor of kicking his legs as Thor sits on his backside and draws off first one leather boot and then the other. Loki has a brief moment to escape as Thor lifts up and turns himself around again, but it’s difficult to make a coherent attempt when he’s so absorbed in trying to keep his breeches up around his hips where they belong.

In his desperation, he’s actually succeeding rather well until something broad and stinging smacks down across his backside. Then he stiffens, embarrassed and dismayed—Thor’s hand, that was Thor’s hand, smacking him like a disobedient child. His shock lasts just long enough for Thor to brusquely tear the breeches from his legs, leaving Loki nude and defenseless.

“No,” he snarls again, shaking as Thor’s weight drops back down on top of him. “You dare not. You dare not!”

One of Thor’s hands palms Loki’s cheek. Thor’s mouth moves sloppily against the nape of his neck.

“I have waited for this moment for so long,” Thor pants, trying to push his way between Loki’s legs. “Do not fight me, Brother. Do not fight what we both desire.”

“I do _not_ desire to be ridden like a mare!” Loki hisses, and the words come out sounding sure and strong despite the voice in his head whispering that he lies, and lies, and lies. He thinks of Thor going to Sif’s bed, of Thor laughing with Sif about the pet Jotun kept locked in the tower, and struggles more ferociously than ever.

Thor sighs behind him, his disappointment clear in the heavy exhale. A moment later, Thor’s hand firmly grips the back of Loki’s skull. Thor pushes his head down, pressing his face into the mattress.

“So be it,” Thor says, “But I promise, Brother, I _will_ have this tonight.”

Loki scrambles at the mattress with his bound hands. He fights to keep his lower body as clenched and tight as he can, but Thor grips his thigh with one hand and hauls Loki’s legs wide. Before Loki can force them shut again, Thor is there, his broad body wedged between Loki’s thighs.

“I bind you to me,” Thor whispers, his breath hot on Loki’s ear. “I claim you—Jotun, magician, Brother—in the name of Odinfather.”

And then, with nothing to ease the way, he begins to push in.

Loki yells where his face is crushed in the mattress—this “ _No!_ ” loud enough and panicked enough to claw its way through the obscuring fabric and feather and find its way into the air. It must also sound different from all the others—perhaps that edge of pain—because the doltish oaf trying to mount Loki as though he’s a woman, with all of a woman’s natural preparations, actually stops. The unrelenting pressure on the back of Loki’s skull eases.

“What is it now?” Thor demands, sounding cross.

Twisting his face to the side, Loki pants, “You’ve obviously never bedded a man before, have you, Brother?” It’s foolish to goad—especially now—but Loki can’t help himself.

“I have bedded hundreds of women, and none of them ever complained,” Thor huffs.

 _Hundreds,_ Loki thinks, and then immediately shoves away the first tendrils of jealousy before they can choke his chest.

“Men are built differently. If you continue like that, you’ll hurt me.” Loki swallows as Thor’s manhood throbs where it’s positioned up against his core. “Badly,” he adds, although he doesn’t even know why he’s begging. Thor has made it quite clear that they’re doing this whether Loki cares to or not. Why should he hesitate at a little blood?

But hesitate he does.

“How do I know this isn’t one of your tricks?”

“It is not. Believe me.”

Loki licks his lips as Thor considers his words, and then comes to a reluctant, dragging decision.

“You don’t want me to fight you,” he says, speaking into the silence. “I don’t want to be torn apart. Perhaps we can reach an arrangement.”

“What sort of arrangement?” Thor asks, although he sounds a little distracted. Likely because he’s occupied with drawing open Loki’s cheeks and prodding his manhood between them as though testing the honesty of Loki’s claim.

Loki’s mouth sours as he forces the words out. “Unfetter my hands and allow me to prepare myself, and I give you my word not to fight you.”

Thor laughs: a rumbling noise that runs into Loki through Thor’s hands and broad thighs. “You must think me the worst of fools,” he says, and Loki can feel him preparing for the thrust inward again.

“Please!” he blurts. “Please, Brother. I beg you.”

Again, Thor hesitates.

“So,” he says after a moment. “It is ‘brother’ again, now that you wish a boon of me.”

Bitter bile fills Loki’s mouth at having to debase himself like this—having to grovel and beg. But he has always feared pain, and he will not endure it now to prove a futile point.

“I will call you whatever you like, just as long as you grant me this.”

“Why should I believe this to be an honest offer?” Thor demands. “What reason could you have to suggest such a thing to me, if not to ply another of your magician’s tricks?”

“Trust me, I’m not thrilled about this myself,” Loki mutters, ignoring the excited thrum of arousal tightening his loins. “But I don’t like pain. And if I must serve, I would rather not be left in agony once you are done with me.”

For a long moment, Thor is silent, and Loki is certain his petition has failed. Thor will believe him well enough after, once he has seen the blood and called for healers to tend that most embarrassing of wounds, but by then, of course, it will be too late.

Then Thor says, “You will call me ‘Brother’, and you will lie with me face to face, as men do with women.”

Loki’s stomach loops unnervingly, and he’s shaking his head before he has finished turning Thor’s counter-offer over in his head. “No.”

He feels, but doesn’t see, Thor shrug.

“Steel yourself, then. Women tell me there is a sting for but a moment, and then such pleasure as cannot be described.” Thor leans down, close enough to plant a kiss on Loki’s shoulder blade. “You and I, Brother. We will find the words together.”

He straightens again, hands going to Loki’s waist and tightening there. This is the moment, then. There will be pain and blood and then the mocking, pitiless eyes of the healers. Their hands, prodding him in intimate, distressing ways.

Sweating and breathless, Loki chokes out, “Wait!”

“Did you wish to say something?” Thor asks with calculated innocence as he strokes his fingers down the sides of Loki’s hips.

“I—” Loki chokes out, and then has to stop. He shuts his eyes, imagining the healers again, and manages, “I will call you Brother.”

“And?” Thor asks, giving a playful thrust of his manhood that makes Loki tense.

“And I will—I will lie with you face to face.”

“And kiss me.”

Loki starts at the added demand, pushing his upper body off the bed and twisting back so that he can see Thor’s smug, grinning face. “That wasn’t the bargain.”

This time, he gets to watch Thor’s broad shoulders hitch in a cheerful shrug. “You declined my first offer. This is the second.”

Despair chokes Loki’s throat—can he possibly have been so outmaneuvered by his lummox of a brother?—and he struggles to mask it with disdain.

“One day,” he says as evenly as he can manage, “I will see to it that you regret this.”

Thor seems less than impressed with the threat.

“Then you agree?”

“Yes, damn you.”

“Swear it by the Allfather.”

Loki refrains from cursing, but just barely. There are few oaths he tends to now. Few that have the power to bind such a thing as he.

Thor has found the strongest, save forcing Loki to swear by his own name.  
“I swear by the Allfather,” Loki says after a brief struggle. His voice sounds dull and resigned in his ears—defeated. And why not? He had little enough hope of protecting himself already, with that word on his tongue, and with Thor’s eyes watching him come apart. Now he must participate beyond preparing himself, and he knows that he will not be able to hold back once Thor is inside him.

He does not posses that depth of self-restraint.

Thor murmurs a command behind him, and a moment later Loki watches as the chain connecting his wrists snaps open before coiling back in with the rest of the chain. He remains fastened to the headboard, but he at least has a better range of motion, and he uses it to flip onto his back and push Thor off of him.

Thor allows himself to be pushed—Loki knows he could not have budged his brother otherwise—and then lies in a calculated sprawl with his legs spread and his manhood jutting toward the ceiling. His very impressive manhood.

Loki feigns nonchalance as he draws his own legs shut and tilts his body away. All too soon, Thor will see and feel more than enough.

“I need oil.”

“There is no oil.”

Loki casts a thwarted, angry look at his brother and sees from Thor’s expression that there could be oil, if Thor wished it. If Thor were not sulking about Loki hiding himself, even just a little bit. Loki could probably earn the oil back if he begged, or he could bargain for it, but he has already given enough of himself away.

He can do without.

Fastening his eyes on the far wall, Loki brings his right hand to his mouth. He feels Thor shift on the bed as he slides his fingers past his own lips, working up as much saliva as he can. Getting them wet. They glisten when he pulls them free, but he doesn’t waste time looking.

Instead, he parts his thighs again and reaches down between them, feeling for his entrance. It doesn’t take long: he has done this before. He has done this imagining Thor’s fingers taking him apart, never dreaming he might have his brother’s touch in truth. Still, with Thor’s eyes on him, it is difficult to take the final step and press his fingers inside.

He fears too much the things his brother will see.

“My patience for delay lasts only so long, Brother,” Thor nudges.

Loki presses his lips together against the challenging insult that rises—the last thing he wants to do at present is imply that Thor’s staying power is anything less than godly—and then shuts his eyes as he eases a finger inside of himself. The initial penetration is as uncomfortable as always, but it isn’t until Loki adds a second finger that he feels the first burning twinge. As he begins to scissor his fingers, the twinge becomes an ache—deep and throbbing, and the only pain that Loki has ever learned to enjoy. He flushes, shamed, as his manhood rises, but he does not still his busy fingers.

By the time he is ready for more slick, his pre-spending is more than copious enough to borrow. He does his best to ignore the sound of Thor’s ragged breathing to his left as he reaches back down, hitching his hips up slightly so that he can fit three fingers inside. His thighs buckle and shudder from the strain of maintaining the position, though, and he has to tense his buttocks rather than relax it, and after only a few moments, he reluctantly lies back against the bed and spreads his legs wider.

Thor’s breath catches audibly, and this time the warm glow that spreads through Loki’s skin isn’t all shame. He can feel Thor’s eyes on him—Thor desiring him. It’s just as intoxicating and heady of a sensation as he knew it would be.

Dangerous. Dangerous and disastrous. But that knowledge does not stop Loki from tilting his lower body up and rocking his hips in sensuous motion as he forces a forth finger in alongside along the first three. His mouth drops open as he finds a rhythm, dipping his fingers repeatedly in and out of his entrance and twisting them about to really loosen the way.

When a hand tentatively brushes his knee an unknown length of time later, Loki is absorbed enough in his own pleasure that he startles. Body jerking, he pulls his fingers free and bolts upright. His entrance throbs and clenches loosely on absolutely nothing at all.

“More,” Thor says hungrily, not seeming abashed at all at having startled Loki. “I want—can you do more?”

For an instant, Loki is tempted. There is power in having conjured such wild need to Thor’s face. And Loki could offer his brother such a show—like all magicians, he knows how to perform with flair when the situation demands it. He could drive himself and Thor to a mutual, frenzied climax without ever laying so much as a finger on his brother.

Then he catches sight of the chains spanning his wrists, and he recalls the chain around his throat, and he remembers that none of this is by his design or will.

“I do nothing for your pleasure,” he says, his voice cold and clipped.

Thor’s expression darkens as his hand shoots out and grips Loki’s erect, leaking manhood. “For your pleasure as well,” he says.

“I am Jotun. We’re expected to be deviant. What is your excuse, Brother?”

Thor meets his gaze steadily, with a cool, calm steel that he lacked before his exile. “Enough preparation, I think,” he says, releasing Loki’s manhood to crawl closer. His nose bumps against the side of Loki’s face. His lips brush Loki’s ear. “On your back.”

Stiffly, and doing his best to pretend he didn’t feel a shiver of pure arousal at Thor’s command, Loki does as he’s told. When Thor crawls gracefully over him, he spreads his legs without having to be asked. His stomach trembles with mingled fear and excitement as Thor grips his thighs and pulls up, tilting Loki into a more accessible position.

“Remember your oath,” Thor warns, holding Loki’s eyes with his own. He waits until Loki has nodded once, then releases Loki’s left thigh to line himself up.

There’s no delay in being taken by Thor; no teasing, humiliating prods proving to Loki how hungry he truly is for this. There’s only a single, inexorable push that drives the air from Loki’s lungs. His hand shoots out to grip Thor’s forearm and holds on as Thor grunts and forces himself even deeper.

“Tight,” Thor grunts, watching Loki from beneath lids half lowered in pleasure. “I—I did not know…”

It’s a vindictive, mischievous impulse that has Loki clench his muscles—the pole-axed expression on Thor’s face is worth the deepened ache it causes.

“Brother,” Thor breathes, sliding his right hand up Loki’s chest to cup the side of his face. There is surprising gentleness in his touch, and love, and Loki burns to think that his brother intends to finish here and then take himself to another bedroom—another bed. Tonight, perhaps. Certainly upon the morrow.

Loki cannot prevent Thor’s leaving any more than he could prevent Thor from laying his claim now, but he can ensure that Thor will not go to Sif carrying any lingering dissatisfactions. Thor may go, but he will not leave Loki’s side eagerly.

“Brother,” Loki murmurs in reply, and then pushes down with his hips in an effort to more easily bring Thor’s body flush with his own. Thor’s manhood is an impressive, full weight inside of him, spreading the delicious burn deeper than Loki has ever felt it before. With an unforced moan, Loki hooks one leg around his brother’s waist and uses his heel to drag him closer.

It’s Thor who makes a startled noise as he seats himself fully, although he recovers quickly, dropping forward and bracing himself over Loki on one elbow. Loki slides an arm around his brother’s back, steadying Thor even as Thor begins to thrust with hard, demanding shoves. Thor’s eyes are open, and wondering, and blue, and Loki kisses him without thinking—he gives himself over to the sensations and desires flooding his body without a second thought.

Thor is every inch as rough as Loki thought he would be. He pounds into Loki as though trying to break him; he bites yet more bruises into his throat; he grips his arms hard enough to leave fingerprints. He bites Loki’s lip and draws blood.

For his part, Loki leaves scratch marks on his brother’s arms and back. He bites his own claim into Thor’s neck. He rocks himself against Thor, pushing up as Thor slams down, and the bed frame rattles beneath them.

 _Let it,_ Loki thinks. _Let it rattle loudly enough for Odinfather to hear. Let him know what we do—what he has given his golden, shining son license to do._

 _Let Sif hear. Let them all._

“Brother!” he cries, roaring loudly enough for his voice to echo from the walls. “Brother!”

He thinks of Sif sitting up in her lonely bed—sitting up with Loki’s cry in her ears—and comes with a shudder. Clenching his inner muscles is an automatic, instinctive response, and Thor utters a choked yell and follows him over. Loki feels his brother’s spend as an unexpectedly hot flood, and the unaccustomed sensation makes him jerk his hips once before Thor grips his thigh and holds him still—holds them together. Thor strains, muscles bunching and tensing, keeping his manhood buried as deep within Loki as he can force it, and then collapses forward onto Loki’s chest: a hot, sweaty weight that crushes Loki into the bed.

“Get off me,” Loki grunts, pushing at the meaty slab of Thor’s shoulder.

Thor grunts stupidly and doesn’t move.

Loki’s body is a collection of aches and bone-deep weariness, and as the last shreds of pleasure leave him, he’s left with nothing but the realization of what he has done. Of how thoroughly he just allowed himself to indulge in the one thing he desires most, but can never truly possess.

Thor mumbles something and shifts, one hand idly patting Loki’s side. Petting him. Cherishing him.

No.

“Get off, you great oaf!” Loki hisses more urgently. This time, when he shoves Thor, Thor sluggishly shifts before resettling. Loki bares his teeth in desperation as panic claws through him—Thor is still inside him, wedged deep where Loki’s legs are spread around him.

“Get out of me!”

Thor lifts his head at that, expression still more stupidly stunned than anything else. But his eyes are awake and aware when he looks at Loki and says, “When I’m done.”

“You can’t be serious,” Loki insists, but Thor gives him a lazy smile and starts thrusting his hips again, and he is—he’s very serious. Loki should have paid more heed to those tales of his brother’s prowess, rather than sneering and stalking away before the vines of jealousy could grow too thorny or too deep.

“Not like this,” Loki demands, shoving at his brother’s body more frantically. “I can’t. Not again.”

“Why?” Thor asks as he works himself back up to speed.

‘Why,’ he asks. As though Loki could explain to him in a million years.

But Thor’s expression clears as he looks down at Loki, and the emotion in his eyes—the pity—seems to indicate that he knows. He thinks he does, anyway.

With the same speed with which he does everything else, Thor withdraws and maneuvers Loki onto his stomach again.

“Up,” he demands, griping Loki’s upper arm and hauling to show what he means, and Loki somehow manages to get onto his hands and knees seconds before Thor enters him again. His entire body shudders with how good it feels, and his chest clenches in fierce, protective denial.

“I knew…” he pants as Thor grips his hips and works himself back up to speed. “I knew you wanted…a Jotun…bitch…”

Thor’s weight collapses down onto him, his chest pressing slickly against Loki’s back. One of Thor’s hands slams down onto the mattress for balance; the other clamps over Loki’s mouth, silencing him.

“No more—unh—lies,” Thor insists. He doesn’t move his hand when Loki bites him. He doesn’t even stutter the rhythm of his thrusts.

Loki tries to cling to himself—surely it should be easier like this, when he doesn’t have to face the unshuttered emotions in Thor’s eyes; when he doesn’t have to hold that cherished word on his lips. But his body is already growing accustomed to Thor’s attentions, and before long he finds himself rocking back into his brother’s driving thrusts.

Thor’s hand slips where it covers his mouth, twisting and forcing fingers past Loki’s lips and teeth. Loki could do some serious damage if he bit down now, but he’s past that, and he merely suckles on them greedily. Now Thor’s rhythm falters, distracted. His fingers twitch against Loki’s tongue.

“Brother,” Thor moans, resting his forehead against the back of Loki’s skull. “Brother, I love you.”

Loki’s breath catches. His mouth stills around Thor’s fingers.

“I love you,” Thor says again, more strongly this time.

Loki can’t get the air to deny it, but he can and does jerk his head to the side. Thor’s fingers fall away, leaving him the potential of speech. The potential to snarl and deny.

The only sound that slips from his lips is a harsh, gutted sob.

“Be calm,” Thor murmurs, smoothing his hand through Loki’s hair and pressing a worshipful kiss to the nape of his neck. “Hush, Brother. Hush.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Loki is aching and half asleep by the time Thor releases him. He rolls onto his side, head spinning with everything Thor whispered to him—the promises he made. The promises Loki can’t believe. He refuses to reach for the sun any more. He’s been burned often enough, and cast back to the distant, cold caverns of the earth. He won’t survive another fall.

He hears his brother robing—the swirl of cloth, the clink of metal. The subtle hum of magic follows, and Thor’s coaxing whistle.

“Here, Boy,” Thor calls softly, and a moment later there is the rusted clank of metallic claws on stone. Then the bed jostles, there’s a scent of metal and ozone, and something warm and solid curls against Loki’s back. He stirs, twisting his head blearily around ( _Fenrir? is that Loki’s wolf?_ ) and then stills again as Thor’s hand lands on his head.

“Rest, Brother,” Thor says. “I have you. You’re home.”

Loki is too tired to argue, although he senses there is a fallacy in Thor’s words. He is also too tired to do more than grunt irritably when Thor kisses his forehead. Thor chuckles, giving Loki’s face a single caress before letting his hand fall away.

“I love you,” he says—a distant, calming voice that disturbs Loki’s descent into sleep only vaguely. “And one day, Brother. One day, you will believe it.”


End file.
